A network of routes crossing Central and Inner Asia and their role in regional and local development changed in the course of time. The spatial image of communications was structured by various environmental constraints and regulated by political factors. Modern information technologies allow integrating historical data of various time periods and accuracy levels, having direct or indirect spatial reference in order to conduct comparative spatial-temporal studies.
Our goals are:

• To make old archive materials (cartographic and textual sources) publicly available through the electronic information system.
• To determine how various environmental (climatic variations) and social (interstate relations) constrains structured and transformed the spatial network of communications since ancient up to modern days;
• To evaluate the changing role of communications along the trade routes in local (oasis) and regional development (demographic, economic and cultural aspects).

Integral part of the project is reconstruction of the spatial-temporal network of the trade routes. Information involved in the study is kept in various Russian archives in the form of maps and reports of the Russian scientific travelers, merchants and military agents, crossing Central Asia in XVII – early XX centuries.

The resulting electronic resource (GIS and MSQL dataset) should fix routes with their characteristics, settlements, important geographic features, like passes, administrative borders. It will be accompanied with some supplementary datasets, applied for our study, like bibliography, old maps descriptors and locators, data on actors: travelers and explorers, following the routes.